I think the misconception here is what users are, or should be, paying for.
I bet most of you eat seafood that did not cost the commercial fisherman
anything. All he had to do was buy the tools and take the time to harvest
the free stuff. I'll leave that to him, gladly, and pay to get mine. It's a
whole lot cheaper than the free fish.
Raise your hands, everyone here who DL'd only from non-profit sites, wrote
their own installation tools/scripts, evaluated all the software to decide
which were most functional and compatible, planned their own system to make
sure they had all the necessary libraries, worked out the hardware
identification and driver issues, and the other work that makes up a distro
instead of a bunch ofhacks that sort of get some of the work done a lot of
the time.
Oh, yeah, and managed to get it on some sort of media.
Hmmm, so maybe Mandrake, RH, Suse, et al do indeed work for their money.
Now another issue. I wish Mandrake would at least suggest a realistic price
(voluntary license? membership?) for additional machines, upgrades, or an
additional DL'd OS without official support. For example, I will probably
encourage Mandrake on my daughters' boxes, and use SNF to run a
firewall/router since we have a cable connection. I have moved from 8.0
Powerpack to 8.2beta.
Considering there is no retailer profit, distribution cost, production and
packaging expense, etc., I'm guessing $20-$30US each "unit" is a reasonable
"license only" figure. So one SNF, and one upgrade come to about $60US.
I've paid that for a club membership, and will encourage my teen daughters to
bump it up a notch if they install on their machines. That would be $120.
I know the voluntary donation thing sets the bankers' hair afire, so the
page was removed/hidden/whatever. But coming out and pricing what is a real,
though unconventional, product is probably necessary. Linux just doesn't fit
a normal production, distribution and pricing model in a material or
philosophical sense.
Fred
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Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
